On Our Radar

Tech Rewind: Earnings, IPOs and Acquisitions

Temperatures are cold in most of the country, but the tech sector is heating things up with a slew of earnings reports, IPO filings and one big very big acquisition.

Earnings season is here again and there was a show of strength from the Silicon Valley as PC-maker Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and electric automaker Tesla (TSLA) rolled out impressive quarterly reports.

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H-P saw better than expected profit and sales as revenue grew in its server division. H-P reported adjusted earnings of $1.7 billion or 90 cents a share on revenue of $28.15 billion, easily topping expectations for profit of 84 cents a share on sales of $27.19 billion.

Tesla shares soared when the automaker posted results that beat expectations and forecast deliveries of 35,000 Model S sedans in 2014, up 55% from last year.

Tesla reported fourth-quarter earnings of 33 cents a share on adjusted revenue of $761 million. The Street was looking for earnings of 21 cents a share on sales of $686 million.

It was not all good news out of the sector; daily deal site Groupon (GRPN) disappointed, forecast a surprise loss for the current quarter that sent shares down, and the Chicago-based company said it will increase spending on marketing.

The string of hacking attacks continued, this time targeting crowd-funding platform Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter said Monday that some of its users’ encrypted passwords and personal information was exposed but no credit card data was breached. Kickstarter’s CEO apologized for the breach and said the company will take steps to ramp up security measures.

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The makers of that addictively sweet candy-themed game Candy Crush Saga are on a sugar high. King Digital entertainment filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday. The deal has yet to price, but the IPO could raise up to $500 million. King saw a profit of $568 million in 2013, up from $8 million in 2012. The London-based company will trade under the ticker symbol ‘KING.’

And from Candy to takeout, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that online restaurant and food delivery service GrubHub Seamless Inc. filed confidentially for IPO. A spokesperson for the company told FOX Business that it had “no news to share.”

Social media behemoth Facebook (FB) is quite the big spender. On Wednesday of this week, it was announced that Facebook threw down $19 billion in cash and stock to acquire global messaging application WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a service that allows users to send messages for free over the Internet rather than via text. Though $19 billion sounds like a hefty premium to pay for a five-year old company with just 50 employees, but WhatsApp has more than 450 million active users all over the world. Facebook is clearly interested in mobile applications with an active user base. In 2012, the social network bought photo-sharing app Instagram for close to $1 billion.